All Blog Posts from World Watch

When I move around Kabul these days, I am reminded of that old cliché: all that glitters is not gold.

The center of the capital has certainly changed. There are multi-colored reflective glass windows adorning the stores, glinting in the sun. Shiny and new. Unlike anything I saw in Kabul the day the city fell to the Northern Alliance forces.

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This analysis was written by CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan, currently embedded with U.S. Troops in Afghanistan.

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There are a few things that really annoy me about the current Afghan debate. As I head back to Afghanistan to cover the Aug. 20 presidential election, I feel compelled to write about them, in the hope that someone will be paying attention.

First is the idea that most — the popularly quoted figure is some 80 percent — of insurgents are "economic," and as such, are driven purely by money. The argument is made that poor villagers are easily recruited by Taliban and al Qaeda leaders who pay them anything from $10 to lay a single bomb, to $400 as a monthly "salary" — more cash than Afghans could earn in neglected, poverty-stricken areas.

Let us not forget that the unemployment rate is 40 percent in Afghanistan and literacy rates barely above 30 percent for men – less than half that number for women. So the argument would seem to make sense — superficially.

I disagree. It's time to blow this argument to pieces.

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We were crouched down in a field, the earth steaming with the heat of the sun and the air thick with humidity. Two Marines were kneeling down beside me.

"All we've done since we got here is get blown up," one of them said. And then they started to talk.

On a patrol exactly like this one a few days ago in southern Helmand province, they had been walking along the canal. One of their Marines stepped on a relatively small explosive device hidden in the ground, most likely a landmine.

The problem was, that mine was linked to a bigger explosive device in a deadly daisy chain that did not miss its mark. The Marine who was walking behind was hit by the bigger, secondary explosion.

"We ran as soon as we heard it go off but when we got to the canal the only thing that was there was his body armor. He was nowhere," they told me, "just gone."

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We were standing on the tarmac on the military side of Kabul airport. I was in a long line of Danish soldiers heading south. We had to hitch a ride on their plane to get to the Marine Brigade Headquarters at Camp Bastion, because the British plane that was supposed to take us the night before had broken down.

The Marine officer accompanying me suddenly exclaimed in dismay, and I looked up. Ahead of us was a U.S. cargo plane, with the American flag visible inside, stretched across the interior. Here that only means one thing: death.

As we watched, the crew carefully removed the body from the plane, carrying it to a waiting vehicle on a stretcher. I could see the green plastic body bag glinting in the burning sun.

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When I first saw the images of bloodied bodies and heard the tales of severed heads coming out of Mexico, I was riveted. It reminded me of Iraq, the shock value of chopping off heads and leaving the bodies on display, as powerful in Mexico as it was on the streets of Baghdad or Mosul or Falluja.

But when I went to Mexico, what I discovered was even more disturbing, as unsettling as the savage nature of the violence is to anyone.

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